Apple? Their books come in large part from Audible. “Sure, there are other companies that can buy your book-but they all just list on Audible, and then take a percentage on top of what Audible is taking. “There are no true competitors to Audible,” Sanderson added. Buying an audiobook through Audible instead of from another site literally costs the author money. Indeed, if indie authors don’t agree to be exclusive to Audible, they get dropped from 40% to a measly 25%. I knew things were bad, which is why I wanted to explore other options with the Kickstarter. Audible pays indie authors less than a bookstore does, when a bookstore has storefronts, sales staff, and warehousing to deal with.” For a frame of reference, most brick-and-mortar stores take around 50% on a retail product. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. “If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale.
Audible pays authors less than brick-and-mortar bookstoresĪudible’s current terms for audiobook royalty payments are pretty dismal for authors, something that shocked Sanderson enough to take this route even knowing that he stands to lose business because of it. The deal Audible demands of them is unconscionable, and I’m hoping that providing market forces (and talking about the issue with a megaphone) will encourage change in a positive direction. “Audible did some great things for books, notably spearheading the audio revolution, which brought audiobooks down to a reasonable price. Sanderson was quick to add that this is not a personal vendetta against the company he and his family use Audible, and he has a great relationship with many people there. “But Audible has grown to a place where it’s very bad for authors. I like the people at Audible, and had several meetings with them this year,” Sanderson wrote in his update.
I don’t want to make an enemy of Amazon (who owns Audible). Yet he’s decided that his four Secret Project novels slated to release in 2023 will not be on the platform “for the foreseeable future.” Sanderson states this will likely cost him “a ton of sales” since “hundreds of thousands” of his readers use Audible, but as with the buzz generated by his Kickstarter, taking this stand is something the author hopes will give the industry a push in a more equitable direction. Sanderson himself revealed that 75% of all preorders for his latest book, The Lost Metal, were in audiobook format, through Audible. But that’s just general fiction in some genres, it’s projected that audiobooks sold through Audible account for much more than that. Audiobooks are the fastest growing form of book consumption: in 2021 alone, fiction audiobooks accounted for around 65% of book sales. Just as Amazon cornered the ebook market with its Kindle devices long before any competitors caught on to the coming digital book revolution, they’ve staked a huge claim on audiobooks with Audible. While those who backed the Kickstarter will receive the books straight from Dragonsteel, Sanderson will publish them for the masses at a later date.īut one place you won’t see any of Sanderson’s Secret Projects for now is Audible, the audiobook giant run by Amazon due to their “unconscionable” pay rates, which he calls out as “shameful behavior” that is “squeezing indie authors to death.”īrandon Sanderson calls out Audible: “It’s a good company doing bad things” Sanderson hit on a lot of this year’s highlights during his yearly State of the Sanderson blog post, focusing on the Kickstarter and the Secret Project book releases. In short, robots designed for optimum productivity have nightmares about this guy. He also published the final novel of Mistborn Era Two, The Lost Metal, and has been hard at work on the highly-anticipated fifth book of The Stormlight Archive.
Sanderson made headlines earlier in the year when he revealed that he’d written five extra books in secret during the pandemic, and launched what would go on to become the most successful Kickstarter campaign in the platform’s history to publish four of those so-called Secret Projects through his own company, Dragonsteel Books. It’s been a pretty big year for Brandon Sanderson, the bestselling author of the Cosmere novel universe as well as a slew of other fantasy and science fiction books.
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